Record cue ball break speed

Has anyone seen Jeff Beckley hit the balls on the break? I watched him hit 32 and up to 34 mph consistently with squating whitey on a 10 ft table. It's one of the hardest I've seen...
 
I've seen some pretty strong breakers in my time, from David Howard and Wade Crane to Francisco and Danny Medina to Larry Nevel and Charley Bryant. The loudest sound and sharpest crack came from the break of George Breedlove in his prime, before hurting his shoulder. IMO he had the hardest break of all. David Howard was probably second. His break looked like a karate punch with full body torque included. He was the first man I ever saw who threw his whole body into the break shot.

Before anyone figured out a way to measure break speed I would have guessed the cue ball was going much faster, maybe 50 or 60 mph. It's hard to follow the path of the cue ball with the naked eye when someone breaks really hard. It still looks a helluva lot faster than 30 mph to me. Hard to believe that's all it is.
 
The nice thing about the speed of sound is that is does not change so unless you move the phone between the impact of the tip and cueball and the impact of the cueball to rack unless there is another spike from ambient noise the calculations are pretty much 99.99% accurate... missing the placement by an inch or 2 is minimal maybe making a half mile an hour... missing the table size is mistakes in the foot realm so of course that throw a wrench into the plans....

As far as radar guns for the break you have to have the gun setup within a specific window of angle to get good results... My experience with them comes from pitching and I can tell you if a ball is involved you have to have it coming pretty much dead at you or dead away from you. Some guns have a large window due to sensitivity but they definitely won't be the $100 models you will see in use most places..... The scout I talked to had a $2000 gun back in the late 80s.. I haven't researched it but I am still betting quality has some effect on accuracy as well as the cosine effect......

The comments about sound compression have a small bit of merit as would pointing out that some phones attempt to adjust sounds so that things are not too loud when you are talking on them... but here is the thing...

In the wave file there will be 2 distinct peaks... Tip Impact and Rack Impact... Sometimes you will get a error on the Blackberry if the back ball in 9 ball shoots off the foot rail and back into a collision and makes another peak but I have not seen this with the droids where they do not utilize sound leveling and I have only seen in on the Blackberry if the ambient room noise is high.....
 
Breaking hard...

I never heard of anything harder than my 34.7 and I believe when I was 25 to 30 I hit them 35 to 36... I never seen harder with such a short bridge!!! :)
 
Jay

jay helfert said:
I've seen some pretty strong breakers in my time, from David Howard and Wade Crane to Francisco and Danny Medina to Larry Nevel and Charley Bryant. The loudest sound and sharpest crack came from the break of George Breedlove in his prime, before hurting his shoulder. IMO he had the hardest break of all. David Howard was probably second. His break looked like a karate punch with full body torque included. He was the first man I ever saw who threw his whole body into the break shot.

Before anyone figured out a way to measure break speed I would have guessed the cue ball was going much faster, maybe 50 or 60 mph. It's hard to follow the path of the cue ball with the naked eye when someone breaks really hard. It still looks a helluva lot faster than 30 mph to me. Hard to believe that's all it is.
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Jay ... I think you are right. I think Breedlove hit 38 mph on a break. Lee Van Corteza breaks pretty hard too.
 
Dirtbmw20 said:
Thanks guys. I swear I have read on the forum SOMEWHERE it was around 33-34mph. He says it is in the mid 20's, around 23-24 and I want to bet him but he wants proof,lol.
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Today my APA area had our Captains/Co-Captains Christmas party. One of the events was a break speed competition, which I hosted. I happened to win the event (no cheating I promise!!). My best was 25.48mph tested with the iPhone app. I've hit 26+ tons of times, and 28.3 was my very best.

However, I should also point out that at another APA event, I personally timed Mike Dechaine at 33.5 mph. We have it on video too. It was by FAR the hardest break I have ever witnessed. I should point out that the cue ball went about 10 feet in the air and off the table. However, Mike had several over 30 that were on the table.

My guess is the 34-35 mph number is about right for fastest record.

KMRUNOUT
 
sfleinen said:
No offense, The Renfro, but I have an incredibly hard time believing that a little cell phone using some app that "measures" speed through impact sound, heard through that little microphone (one of the many variables that affects the accuracy of this sound), is somehow "more accurate" than a radar gun that measures speed by actual motion.
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Sean,

The concept that the $5.99 app is more accurate than my $300 radar gun was a hard pill to swallow. If you have a hard time believing that it could be more accurate than a radar gun, you should perhaps look into the two technologies a little further. There are FAR more difficult variables for the radar gun to overcome. First and foremost is cosine error issues. This refers to the idea that the radar gun will not read accurately unless the object is moving directly towards the gun. Unless you happen to be using the radar gun on a table with no rails, and decide to smash the cue ball right into it, you WILL have error in your reading. Depending on the angle, the error can be giant. The other major issue for the radar gun to overcome is target acquisition speed. A little cueball which is round, shiny, and small all present difficulties for a radar gun. Often it will not return any reading at all. Fluorescent lights can play havoc with a radar gun as well.

Having used both, I can tell you that the iPhone app is considerably more consistent. Also, the *technology* behind the app has the potential to be RADICALLY more accurate than a radar gun. Don't forget that the sound file your iPhone is recording has tremendous resolution, and depending on your settings could even be 44,100 measurements per second. The principle sources of error in the app are correct designation of starting cueball position, and the algorithm's ability to correctly identify the correct portions of the waveform as being the sound of the cueball-tip impact and the cueball-rack impact. Bouncing cueballs and other collision related noises can also fool it. Overall, though, I'd say the app is a much better option.

I think you should look into the technology further. Remember the age we live in. The "little app" as you put it represents technology that is WAY ahead of radar guns...heck an iPhone would humiliate NASA's computers from the 60's!

Hope this helps you understand this topic a bit better.

KMRUNOUT
 
hillbilly said:
I never heard of anything harder than my 34.7 and I believe when I was 25 to 30 I hit them 35 to 36... I never seen harder with such a short bridge!!! :)
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Whats goin on my man, long time no see.


I dont know if anyone has ever been clocked higher but I can say for sure that when you were young (maybe before 25) you hit them harder than anyone I had ever seen. When you started uncorking that break it had an intimidating crack to it, Larry is the only one I know that is close to how you smacked em.

Later,
Daniel
 
sfleinen said:
Code-wise, the app could be accurate (and from a coder's myopic point-of-view, his/her code is always "perfect," right?). But the issue is not with the code itself. It's with the equipment -- the cell phone itself:

1. That mass-produced cell phone's wafer-microphone with no emphasis or engineering on sound quality/capturing at all.
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The quality of the sound is pretty much irrelevant. All that matters is that the microphone is capable of recording a relative peak in the sound. Digital audio programs (on which the app is based), have extremely accurate time clocks. The quality of the analog to digital conversion *might* be a factor, but again even a crappy converter has more than enough resolution to record the important information.

sfleinen said:
2. Audio compression -- all cell phones use it. Audio compression is a LOSSY compression (meaning, it loses information *by design* -- just like picture/image compression [e.g. JPEG, GIF]). A cell phone *has* to use compression to accommodate different sound levels in different acoustic environments -- from inside small quiet enclosures like a restroom, all the way on up to a concert hall or noisy street.
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I think you might be confusing the ideas of compression as it relates to data recording and as it relates to sound. The microphone on most cell phones certainly uses BOTH for making calls. However, there is no reason to believe that audio recordings are subject to either. Regular audio compression is *probably* used, as I doubt the dynamic range of the little cell condenser mic is very much, but this is not for sure either. The audio compression (in which the amplitude input/output follows a curve or line that is not a 1:1 ratio) would not have any bearing on the app's accuracy, unless the compression was so extreme all amplitudes were reduced to near zero. (Obviously not the case). The data compression (in which the analog input from the microphone is converted to digital at a very low sampling rate) *might* have a bearing, but again...not likely unless it was extreme (which it isn't). When you refer to "lossy" compression, you are referring to either the analog to digital conversion process, or else a dithering function that reduces the bit rate and or sampling rate after it was already converted to digital.

sfleinen said:
3. Placement of the cell phone in relation to the sound.
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This is not statistically significant. Do the math. It is essentially irrelevant. However, it is extremely easy to overcome this "problem" by simply placing the phone the same distance from the cue ball and the rack. Either way, remember how much time we are talking about for sound to travel 5 feet.

sfleinen said:
4. What you mentioned with inherent error in "placement of the cue ball" on the app, in preparation for the sound of the break itself, is huge. In the short distance on the table, a placement error of 1 inch can result in a significant discrepancy in the calculation of the speed.
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This is the only item on the list so far that can potentially matter. And it can matter a LOT. There are some techniques for getting pretty accurate. I've played around with this, and if you can at least be within a ball's width, you are only talking about a few tenths of a mph.

sfleinen said:
5. Speed guns "flaky"? Sure, if they are not calibrated at regular intervals like they are supposed to. (And in our financially constrained times, it's not uncommon for speed guns to miss their periodic recalibrations, because the owner is pinching pennies.) We've all heard the stories about speeding tickets being thrown out in courtroom because the defendant "had the speed gun tested, and it measured the speed of an apple resting on the desk as 'moving at 20mph'." The fact is, while that may have happened long ago (even *that* is debatable), today, those are definitely urban legends.

-Sean
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Don't forget that police radar guns are expensive. Like thousands expensive. A really nice sports radar gun that is even capable of reading 0.1 mph accurately is close to $1k. So my old $300 radar gun is not equal to say a $1000 Stalker gun that can read tenths...

Also, not sure if you have personal experience using a radar gun, but the person who said they are "flakey" probably did. I say this because in my own personal experience, there is "flakiness" in a perfectly calibrated gun. Lights, acquisition speed, etc. all can make the reading hit or miss (see my other post). However, usually when you *do* get a reading, it is going to be within the accuracy tolerances of the gun, but NOT always.

Hope this helps,

KMRUNOUT
 
Samiel said:
In terms of true accuracy, I would pick a radar gun over a sound app if both were used properly. However, I think the sound app is easier to use for most people in a correct manner.

Just through personal experience, I've seen huge variances with people who use radar guns for measuring speed. My experience is not through pool, but with baseball pitching, so maybe this doesn't apply to pool as accurately. I've seen radar guns measuring baseball pitches fluctuate wildly, which makes me think the users of the radar guns either didn't know how to use them correctly or that they are hard to use properly.

In any case, I really do believe the sound apps are accurate as long as the measurement from the cueball to the rack is accurate. Obviously the speed of sound comes in to play as well, but a few millimeters won't make a huge difference.
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Actually the only device that is REALLY accurate is the laser trap, where a device measures the time it takes to break two laser beams that are a fixed distance apart. Of course this only works if you break straight on.

KMRUNOUT
 
hillbilly said:
I never heard of anything harder than my 34.7 and I believe when I was 25 to 30 I hit them 35 to 36... I never seen harder with such a short bridge!!! :)
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Awesome Charlie!! I have never heard of anything faster either. I want to see you hit in the 30's. Maybe at Valley Forge this year? I know you can, I just like *seeing it* !!

KMRUNOUT
 
There was a BCA trade show in Minneapolis back around 1994. One of the vendors had set up a radar gun and many of the pro's were there. Sammy Jones had the high speed for the weekend, I believe it was 34 mph.
 
You mean the guy that told me he spent a day practice breaking 38-40mph with Archer was lying?!?! Hey, he can't break like that all the time because it hurts the table.

He was using his "accuracy" speed while I was watching him...15-20mph.
 
Where do you get the app ? And what is it called ? I know a guy that want's to check his break speed.
 
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